Unicode text styles: a complete reference

Styled text on social media is not a font. It is a set of different characters that happen to look like letters, drawn mostly from Unicode’s Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. That is why the styling survives copy and paste, and also why it breaks in places a font never would.

This page documents all 15 styles our bold text generator produces: every letter, which styles support numbers, which letters use irregular codepoints, and where each style fails. Every character below is generated from the same conversion code the tool runs, so this reference cannot drift out of step with the product.

Coverage at a glance

Every character, style by style

Copy any row directly. If a character shows as a box on your device, that device is missing the glyph; the character is still correct and will usually render for other people.

Where these characters break

These limits are inherent to the approach, not to any particular generator. Any tool producing Unicode styled text has them.

• Hashtags do not work. Platforms index the literal characters, so #𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱 is a different tag from #Bold and usually is not clickable at all.
• Search and mentions miss them. Someone typing your name in plain letters will not find a profile written in styled characters.
• Screen readers handle them badly. VoiceOver and NVDA may read each character by its Unicode name, spell the word out letter by letter, or skip it. If your audience includes people using assistive technology, keep the substance in plain text and use styling for a single callout at most.
• Some fields reject them. Facebook’s profile name field and many account-registration forms refuse non-standard characters.
• Rendering is device-dependent. A glyph missing from the local font shows as an empty box. Bold and italic sans-serif are the most widely supported; Squared and Fraktur the least.
• Not all tools agree. Styles are implemented by hand, so two generators can emit different codepoints for the same style name.

Why only 5 styles have numbers

The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block was added to Unicode so mathematicians could write formulas in plain text, where a bold vector and an italic variable mean different things. Digits were encoded only for the styles where mathematical notation needed them: bold, sans-serif, sans-serif bold, monospace and double-struck. Script, Fraktur and the italic styles never got digits because mathematical notation does not use them, and Unicode does not add characters for decorative purposes.

That history also explains the irregular letters. Several characters, such as ℋ and ℯ in Script, had already been encoded in the Letterlike Symbols block before this one existed, so Unicode pointed at the existing character rather than duplicating it.